David Joseph Carpenter, the Trailside Killer of the early 1980s whose murders spread fear in the Bay Area's parklands and open spaces, has been tied by DNA evidence to a San Francisco slaying in which he had long been a suspect, police said Tuesday.

In eight months in 1980 and 1981, Carpenter murdered six women and one man along trails in Marin and Santa Cruz counties. Many of the women were raped. An eighth would-be victim survived to identify him, and Carpenter, now 79, is on San Quentin State Prison's Death Row.

The killing of Mary Frances Bennett, 23, in San Francisco in 1979 was one of several other slayings in which authorities suspected Carpenter but were never able to bring a case against him. Prosecutors have not yet decided whether to file charges based on the new evidence.

Bennett's body was found Oct. 21, 1979, near the Palace of the Legion of Honor at Lands End. She had been stabbed at least 25 times in the neck, chest and back and her body had been buried beneath a thin layer of dirt and branches. One police officer said she had been "butchered."

Killed while jogging

Bennett, who lived on 44th Avenue in the Sunset District, was wearing a T-shirt, shorts and running shoes. Police said they believed she was jogging at Lands End when she was killed.

After Carpenter was arrested in 1981, San Francisco police identified him as a suspect in Bennett's slaying. Then, for nearly 30 years, the case lay dormant.

On Tuesday, Inspector Joe Toomey of the cold-case unit said crime-lab technicians had recovered unspecified DNA evidence in December. They learned last month that it matched a sample of Carpenter's DNA in a state database.

Last week, San Francisco police crime-lab technicians reported that a confirmation sample obtained Feb. 3 from Carpenter at San Quentin matched the DNA evidence from the killing, Toomey said.

Montana native

Bennett grew up in Deer Lodge, Mont., and had recently moved to San Francisco after graduating from an accounting school in Montana. She was an intern at a Post Street accounting firm; when she was killed, she was wearing a T-shirt that read, "Hell's Accountant."

Bennett's siblings still live in Montana. "They were relieved" at the DNA find, Toomey said, "but I think it was a shock that we called them out of the blue."

Bennett's parents are dead. Joseph Bennett, 55, of Plentywood, Mont., one of Mary Bennett's three brothers and the oldest of five surviving siblings, said Tuesday his family always assumed that Carpenter was responsible based on what police told them at the time.

He said he was surprised that police had followed up on the case, given the time and expense.

"I guess it's nice that they know for sure and it's put to rest," Bennett said. "I'm glad they have the person and he's incarcerated."

Lifetime of sex crimes

Carpenter was gray-haired, bespectacled and spoke with a severe stutter when he moved in with his parents on Sussex Street in Glen Park in 1979. He had a record of sex crimes stretching back to 1947, and had just finished his most recent nine-year stint in prison for rape and parole violations.

During a six-week period in 1980, Carpenter shot five people to death with a .38-caliber pistol at Point Reyes National Seashore and on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais. They were Richard Stowers, 19, of Petaluma; his fiancee, Cynthia Moreland, 18, of Cotati; Anne Alderson, 26, of San Rafael; Diane O'Connell, 22, of San Jose; and Shauna May, 25, of San Francisco.

The following spring, Carpenter raped and shot to death a co-worker at a Hayward print shop, Heather Scaggs, 20, whose naked body was found in Big Basin State Park near Santa Cruz. He also killed UC Davis student Ellen Marie Hansen, 20, at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in Santa Cruz County, after she resisted his rape attempt.

Carpenter was caught because Hansen's boyfriend, Steven Haertle, whom he had shot in the neck and left for dead, survived to identify him. Carpenter was arrested in May 1981.

He was sentenced to death after being convicted of the Santa Cruz murders in 1984 in Los Angeles County, where the trial was moved because of publicity. A jury in San Diego County convicted him of the Marin killings in 1988, and a judge sentenced him to die.

The state Supreme Court upheld both of Carpenter's death sentences in the 1990s. Appeals in both cases are awaiting review by U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco.